Post a Comment On: Digitally Staving Off Boredom

As I move into another bizarro weekend off, Origin assures me that I am at 139 hours spent in The Sims 4. It is good I am getting some time into it because I blew around $225 in Sims 4 expansions this month.  What a bender!  But my splurging is not completely over, as I had heard that Rune Factory 4 Special is coming out next week (the 25th of February) and have preordered it, as well as Animal Crossing: New Horizons (which releases the 20th of March).
If I am shooting for a buck an hour of entertainment (and I am), I know for a fact that Rune Factory 4 Special can easily meet 45 hours of play.  Rune Factory 4 is a huge game filled with farming, crafting, dungeon crawling, NPC socializing, and more.  In fact, the completionist route is closer to 200 hours!  Though my confidence that I will necessarily get that many hours out of it is shaken by the fact that I already bought it on 3DS a whopping 6 1/2 years ago and hardly played it.

In truth, the real reason I picked up Rune Factory 4 Special has a lot to do with recently remembering how much I enjoyed Nagasarete Airantō, an anime about a 14-year-old boy who runs away from an abusive household only to be swept overboard and wash up on an island where the male population went missing 12 years ago.  Being the only boy on the island, it quickly becomes a stereotypical unwanted harem comedy, and that's fun.  Also fun is that this island is a magical place, a small slice of medieval Japan, complete with Shinto magic, talking animals, and its own version of Mount Fuji in the middle.
[Image] I loved watching Nagasarete Airantō.  It might not be the best anime out there but, much like how I enjoyed Best Student Council, there is a certain campy appeal that elevates it above the base sum of its parts.  I noticed it seems to be streaming included in Amazon Prime right now so check it out and see for yourself.

Part of the appeal is the Isekai scenario itself.  Something core to our primal nature seems to enjoy the idea of being transported into a magical world of high adventure.  What was The Iliad, if not a story of a sailor who finds himself dragged into several such lands before finally finding his way back to his beloved?  The island of Airantō is a really fun place to be, an amalgamation of many great anime tropes in addition to a portal of escapism (which all Isekai scenarios basically are).
[Image] Though no official Nagasarete Airantō dating sim exists, it is obvious why the outro can feature one as a theme.  Another part of the appeal is the characters.  Like the roster of many major stories, the cast in Nagasarete Airantō was carefully assembled out of likable tropes, for example: 
The leading lady is a lovely girl with unsurpassed skill and virtue, though her purity extends to being comically naive at times.   There are a couple of Shinto shrine maiden sisters who have radically different personalities, with the smaller (older) one being better at magic and a bit of a sadist.  Her bigger (younger) sister is chronically overconfident and often the subject of the older's tormenting. There is a geeky bookworm who lives in a western-style mansion and studies artifacts from the modern world that wash up on the beach.   There is a petite girl who is annoyed that people think she looks younger than she is even though spends most of her time playing around with her magical animal friends. There is a strong girl who does construction with the rest of her family but is sensitive about her feminine side.   Unsurprisingly, the majority of the stories center on one or more of the girls that make up the unwanted harem.  The appeal of cute girls in Japanese character casts is often described as Moe (pronounced mo e) and is essentially an obsession with implausibly perfect maidens.  Whenever there is a shark to be jumped, another one will suddenly turn up.
[Image] There is more to the cast than the maidens, of course.  Clever unwanted harem comedies like this also spin the center of the harem as something desirable, and it is fair to say that there are subtle Bishōnen traits about the noble young protagonist (who is also, in unwanted harem comedy tradition, the frequent Butt Monkey).  The supporting cast of other villagers and talking animals appear rarely but do their job well.  As a whole, there is a lot to like about these characters, so it's little wonder that the manga is still ongoing (though the fan service has only increased over the years).

Of course, there is the third appeal as well, one that is just as prevalent to their island adventures as the cute girls and the magic on display: the humor.  There is a lot of slapstick, situational comedy, and otherwise poignant moments of fun to be found in Nagasarete Airantō.  It is the entertaining glue that holds the whole thing together.
At least Rune Factory 4 played it fair by providing plenty of options for either gender preference.  No same-sex relationships, though, and I am pretty sure the ones of the same gender become romantic rivals (a common Harvest Moon mechanic). I enjoyed Nagasarete Airantō, but how does Rune Factory 4 hold up as a game of a similar scenario? 
In terms of the Isekai appeal, the protagonist (who can be of either gender) is not truly falling between worlds, but they do end up (literally) falling into a new life, with amnesia to go with it. (Also, a fantasy game could be considered a portal for the player's imaginations, so there's that.) With the main theme of "passionate love, sweet marriage," you had better believe that a lot of effort was spent on making the townies have likable personality and dialogue.  In terms of Moe and Bishi, their ranks include plenty of aspiring bachelors and bachelorettes, each one a real case study example of how to assemble tropes into original characters.  Personally, I really like that you get to be friends with a dragon god in this one (being a benevolent feathered serpent, perhaps inspired somewhat by Quetzalcoatl). Rune Factory 4 is not really a comedy, with only the occasional sideways outtake in what's otherwise more of a fantasy Harvest Moon.  Instead, we get the fun of the game mechanic, and it doesn't hurt that our character is in a rather cool role of a magical farmer/royalty/craftsman/adventurer. Verdict: It's not the island in Nagasarete Airantō, but it's close enough!

To some extent, I bounced off of Rune Factory 4 when I played it on the 3DS because I found the personalities of the townsfolk to be less interesting than the ones I enjoyed in Rune Factory Frontier, but it has been a while so perhaps I will feel differently this time.  Besides which, Rune Factory 4 Special is being presented on a far larger, brighter screen with a number of enhancements such as optional tougher difficulty and better animations on the character portraits.

As for Animal Crossing: New Horizon, I was shocked to see that they were charging a full AAA box price for it, something they had not done since the original Animal Crossing was released almost two decades ago on the GameCube.  Still, it was a foregone conclusion I would buy it.  Though the real reason why I bought the Nintendo Switch might have been because I was dazzled with all the interesting games being shown off at the 2017 E3 event, it was my belief that there would eventually be a new Animal Crossing game on it that drove much of that purchase impulse.  It took almost another three years, but that time is almost here.
At times, I think perhaps my reasons for wanting to play Animal Crossing are not entirely pure.  This is partly because the gameplay of this series seems to string along the players with a series of minor endorphin hits as they are rewarded for virtually everything they do.  As Yahtzee puts it, "[The original Animal Crossing] was somewhat before its time because it was a Facebook game before Facebook games were a thing." As the series has progressed, the mechanics of the addictive core game loop have only been reinforced.  This series takes prisoners.

But the greater lack of purity I feel towards my motivation to play the game is that I find the cute animal neighbors kind of attractive.  That's odd, because (other than an excess of makeup) the initial impression of the animal villagers is that they're a bit too young (not to mention the wrong species).  Their dialogue is just the same eight recycled personalities, and their appearance is predominantly that of stuffed animals (some more than others).  Even with all these points against them, they do indeed exude some level of attractiveness, but why?
[Image] Piercings, blonde, mascara, eyeshadow, wearing a dress, independent.  Harkness has done worse. Part of it might be because the abstraction of their anthropomorphic visual designs actually ends up distancing them from the uncanny valley.  This makes them attractive in the same way Moe designs do: the reduced detail of their presentation leads to an absence of discernable flaw.  Deep in our innate selection bias is something that looks for a lack of blemish or personality flaws as proof of genetic viability, and you can bet evolution never adapted to digital make believe worlds.

In terms of the animal villagers' social role, it not what how they literally appear, but rather what they represent.  The Animal Crossing scenario is one where you are living in a village with neighbors designed to be cute, their age deliberately ambiguous, but most of them appear to be living independently, even to the point where they move in and out of the village randomly.  After a while, the players' inner ape can't help but point out that living in a village full of young people who are not tied down has potential.  You're playing a single among singles.
If nothing else, given the sheer amount of time players end up spending playing Animal Crossing games, it's probable that a bit of Stockholm Syndrome has set in.  For many players, Animal Crossing: New Leaf took up an hour or two every day for years.  When held captive by the core game loops this addictive, there is plenty of time for interfering details to get mentally abstracted out of the fantasy.  So, for many adult players (but certainly not all) innuendo results.  This innocent game is not remotely programmed to reciprocate, so the urst can only build.   [Image] My crowning achievement in Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp was this bedroom where it is implied that I fell out of a bed appropriate for a mincing but commercially exploited weirdo and died surrounded by the portraits of the animals whose constant demands consumed my life.  The steam vent at the head of the bed implies I haunt it still. In more ways than one, I know the game isn't good for me.  Yet, here I am, returning willingly to that mental prison with Animal Crossing: New Horizons.  Why?  Because, as a portal for escapism, playing Animal Crossing: New Leaf made me happy (if a tad pent-up with urst) and I want more of that.  Time will tell if Rune Factory 4 Special suits me better, a game with far deeper gameplay (and where the dating simulator feature is intentional).